Making digital connectivity optical, in addition to allowing cities to experience an era of evolution thanks to smart technology, also contributes to optimizing the investment of local public resources.

London tends to be at the forefront of technology. It was in 1953, marking a milestone by broadcasting the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on open television. Almost 70 years later, the same monarch entered the digital world by opening her own Instagram account in 2019.

Without a doubt, for the UK's capital, and most populous city, spearheading global industrial revolutions is almost routine practice. For this reason, it was expected that in 2020, London would once again rank as the smartest city according to the IESE Cities in Motion index.

Leading a list of Smart Cities, surpassing cities such as New York, Paris, Tokyo and Copenhagen, implies designing a technological ecosystem where Digital Transformation is the common denominator of public administration and the private environment, as is the Smarter London Together project, which is intended to be a flexible digital master plan to make the city the smartest in the world. 

This journey establishes guidelines for public - private collaboration, everything from transportation to health care services. It also seeks to work more effectively with the technology community, universities, and other cities. 

To materialize this aspiration, making the digital infrastructure optical becomes a determining factor, since at present only this technology has proven to have the capacity to support and satisfy the demand generated by the demanding and dynamic ecosystem of a Smart City.
For Denys de Souza Scheiner, Coordinator of product and app engineering for the southern cone of Furukawa, a Japanese communication network infrastructure company with over 130 years of history, explains that “fiber optics allows the new bandwidth and latency requirements demanded by 5th Generation technology to be met, a basic requirement for building smart cities. In fact, to ensure operation of the 5G network and smart devices -IoT-, in terms of quality of service, speed and bandwidth, more antennas will be needed, which will have to be connected through optical networks.”

Another example of how fiber optics, in addition to allowing cities to experience an era of evolution thanks to smart technology, can also save significant amounts of public resources, is Barcelona. 

The second largest city in Spain recorded a savings of 75 million euros (almost US$ 90 million) by installing an extensive fiber optic network. These resources were used to expand the local labor market by 47,000 new jobs related to the smart technology sector. 

With the implementation of fiber optics, Barcelona managed to provide high-speed WiFi, free and compatible with IoT devices, expanding the scope of smart technologies related to basic services, public lighting and urban transport.

Now, the cities that will take the lead in the transition from traditional cities to Smart Cities will be those that have robust optical networks implemented, since they will be able to handle the potentialities of the new generation in digital connectivity, such as telemedicine, automation through smart devices and, ultimately, improve the levels of services and well-being of citizens.

“Smart cities are rapidly multiplying, which poses significant challenges in terms of connectivity. Currently, most households in the United States have at least one IoT device. This trend is already being observed in larger cities of Latin America and the more smart devices that are in operation, the more bandwidth will be required to meet the demand for this smart future”, concludes Denys 
from Furukawa.